The opioid crisis is the biggest public health problem in the United States. It has imposed havoc on the hospitals, law enforcement, and exacting negative impact on families and mortality rate. It has also caused chaos and mayhem in the general society. This pandemic is worse than the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

This article argues that the contagion is a product of the 1972 protocols on psychotropic substances. According to the global treaties the 1972 protocols on psychotropic substances can be described as the codification of narcotic substances, and rules for international control and use of the drug for medicinal and scientific purposes, and also to prevent people from harming themselves and society from using drugs. This amendment of the 1960 Single Treaty is linked to the worst-ever opioid crisis in the United States of America. Opioids are very strong painkiller made from raw opium. It can be synthetically produced. Opioids are pain medication such as morphine, methadone and others. The rapid increase in prescription of opioids in the late 20th century set off a drug crisis in Canada and the United States in the early decade of the 21st century.

North-South geopolitics

The charge that this drug crisis is a product of the politics of the international drug treaties is well justified by an array of studies calling for reform of the international treaties. One of these significant bodies of information is the Canadian Senate Report published in 2002. It reads: “We conclude from these observations that the international regime for the control of psychoactive substances, beyond any moral or even racist roots it may initially had, it’s first and foremost a system that reflects the geopolitics of North-South relations in the 20th century. Indeed, the strictest controls were placed on organic substances — the cocoa bush, the poppy and the cannabis plant — which often part of the ancestral traditions of the countries where these plants originate, whereas the North’s cultural products, tobacco and alcohol were ignored and the synthetic substances produced by the North’s pharmaceutical industry were subjected to regulation rather than prohibition.”

This experience reflects the history of the “domination of the uncivilised (imperialism)” a process assisted by the role of the press, the Church and the system of education. One writer informs that in the practice of cultural imperialism, the metropolitan centre determines the educational policy as well as the media/information influence. The periphery responds as obedient learners and look to the centre for validation and dependence. This experience is one of the major stumbling blocks in the call for the reform of the international drug treaties. It helps to explain the history and practice of the international drug treaties and the emergence of domestic drug laws and amendments.

Medical ganja and

According to observers the current opioid crisis in America exceeded the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Leading reports from the United States show that opioid-related drug abuse kills more people that car accidents and guns in that country. There is a view that the opioid crisis has its roots in the 1990s when the pharmaceutical companies were vigorously lobbying doctors to prescribe opioids for severe pain treatment.

According to a source in Forbes magazine (2017), the concern in America is worrying because in the past it was Hispanics and blacks that were dominant characters in drug epidemic. Whites, ranging from 45 to 65 years old, are now the central characters in this opioid crisis. The American Government is in a quandary because of this intractable drug crisis.

A recent study (2017) shows that medical cannabis is a promising solution in treating opioid addiction. Coleen Barry, professor at John Hopkins University, reported in a New York Times (2016) article that the use of legalised medical marijuana is an effective treatment for severe pain, and that in states where there is access to medical marijuana the annual rate of opioid deaths decreased substantially by 25 per cent. The New York Times later reported that in January 2019 there has been 19 per cent increase in opioid death from 2015 to 2016. This crisis reduced life expectancy in America, as well as the tripling of opioid deaths from 1999 to 2015, accompanied by five million hospital visits per year. One source reported that in five years Medicaid spending on drugs increased by 90,000 per cent. There is, indeed, an important role in the use of natural-based medical marijuana to assist in the struggles against the most severe occurrence of the opioid drug epidemic in the history of America.

Ganja diplomacy

There is a growing body of literature providing new and profound directions aiming to reform the international drug treaties. Many of these ideas are created and advanced by civil society groups and non-government organisation (NGOs). It is important that like-minded countries as well as like-minded civil society groups and NGOs develop a coherent campaign, especially among developing countries unite to challenge the archaic international drug treaties. It is also important that the public education programmes on drugs should take into consideration matters concerning the international treaties.

Students across the globe studying international relations should have the kind of curriculum to respond intelligently and creatively to these kinds of issues. In other words, we must develop our own knowledge base to enter into the discussion for reform of the international treaties in new forms of anti-imperialist offensives leading into the ganja diplomacy, that is a new international to lobby for reform of the international treaties.

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